Decorate Your Home Like An Italian Villa With Issimo, By Pellicano Hotels CEO And Creative Director Marie-Louise Sciò

“Don’t these umbrellas just make you feel like you’re living in a Visconti film?” sighs a guest at Hotel Mezzatorre, located on the island of Ischia in south Italy. She is worshipping the September sun from a lookout terrace nestled in the hotel’s private cove on the sparkling Gulf of Naples. “It must be the flounce. We need one for our garden back home,” says her daughter. The guests will soon discover that they can, in fact, have one of Italy’s most-iconic sun umbrellas made to measure, and keep their la dolce vita fantasies alive long after their holiday is over.

The luxury hotel experience is evolving. Post-pandemic, it seems that the hotels topping people’s ‘must-visit-in-my-lifetime’ list are transcending the hospitality sphere, consolidating their ‘brands’ as global design tastemakers, storytellers, innovators of style. How? By curating visions of an aspirational lifestyle encompassing everything from home decor to food, fashion, beauty and beyond. Whether it’s co-designing an embroidered kaftan collection with a local couture workshop or curating an ‘in-house’ collection of design objects that add flair to the dinner table, it takes an intuitive creative vision at the helm of a luxury hotel brand to explore the power of design to immerse us in an authentic experience of a destination, its history and its local culture.

Marie-Louise Sciò is the CEO and Creative Director of Pellicano Hotels,the hotel group celebrated for offering aspirational luxury experiences through immersive, multi-sensory design journeys across three storied destinations in Italy; the mystical Mezzatorre Hotel & Thermal Spa in Ischia, the fabled Hotel Il Pellicano in Porto Ercole on the Tuscan coastline, and La Posta Vecchia, a secluded gem on the coast of Palo Laziale near Rome. Sciò knows style. From the ceramic pine cone lamp beside the bed at Hotel Il Pellicano, to the hand-painted Colonna Rossatiles at La Posta Vecchia, her vision encompasses a detail-oriented approach to design and curation that invites guests to slow down, look closer, and discover authentic stories and narratives through the objects they engage with. These subtle discoveries through design are surely the mark of true luxury.

“What people look for is things with a story, with a sense of identity, and when it comes to luxury hotels, I also think they look for things they can’t find anywhere else. Sure, you can go to Paris, New York, London or Japan and stay in the same 5-star hotel and know exactly what to expect because they are all furnished in the same way, using the same colours, and they all have exactly the same atmosphere regardless of where you are in the world. But I think there is a shift away from this to an experience that feels more personal, and to one that has more character,” says Sciò. “From the interior design to the curation of design objects in our hotels, there’s a storytelling layer inherent in our approach and I think this is what our guests connect with. This is what they remember, both consciously and unconsciously.”

Creativity attracts creativity, style attracts style. Purchased by Sciò’s parents in 1979, Hotel Il Pellicano has what some might call an ‘impossibly chic’ history of being the secluded Italian summer escape for the likes of Sophia Loren, Jackie Onassis and a host of other divas, artists, designers, socialites and jetsetters. Today, all three properties attract a diverse clientele of guests, including those who know a Gaetano Pesce vase when they see one. Over the past decade, Sciò – with her immaculate eye for detail and innate ability to create an atmosphere of effortless elegance through the combination of design, art and fashion – has cultivated an international legacy as Creative Director of Pellicano Hotels. Through the process of overseeing the design, interiors and furnishing of the three properties, she has nurtured relationships with artisans, ateliers and designers across Italy, celebrating Italian traditions, culture and philosophies through their products, which she proudly features in each. 

Sciò has also initiated collaborations with premium artisanal brands and design houses across the fashion, beauty and home décor sectors, including Matchesfashion, Villeroy & Boch, Lisa Corti, L.G.R Eyewearand Byredo, who created a bespoke candle (L’Orto Italiano) inspired by the lush, aromatic vegetable gardens on La Posta Vecchia’s sprawling grounds. From a sleek, Aperol Spritz-coloured swimsuit to a candle bursting with notes of tomato and basil, Sciò’s approach to design is self-reflective – a lively and authentic expression of Italian culture and lifestyle that the world has a seemingly enduring love affair with. Honestly, who isn’t going to pretend they’re Claudia Cardinale sauntering around Mezzatorre’s tower in a bathrobe and slippers, or perhaps, the mistress ofJean Paul Getty descending one of two marble staircases inside La Posta Vecchia’s 17th-century art-filled Medici Suite, a Renaissance masterpiece by all accounts. 

“Whether it’s the hotels themselves, the interiors, or the collaborations we explore with brands and artisans, I design things that I want to put in my own home. The important thing for me is having a point of view. I design and select things based on my personal taste, not to try and cater for other people’s styles,” says Sciò. “This is why I created Issimo, to share Italian artisanship with people all over the world. We are extending the design experience of our hotels and making it accessible to everyone; introducing people to the brands and artisans whom we believe to be exceptional, and whose products we want to surround ourselves with every day.”

What is Issimo? It’s the digital extension of the Pellicano universe, the platform where Sciò’s artisanal discoveries and musings on ‘mythical Italian beauty’ are made available for people all over the world to discover and to purchase. Part visual diary, part virtual tour of Italy, Issimo is a holistic ‘lifestyle’ that captures the experience of being at one of Pellicano’s hotels and their surrounding locations, with products spanning interior décor, clothing, beauty products, souvenirs and, yes, even those striped sun umbrellas. So, if you haven’t floated in Mezzatorre’s sacred thermal waters (…yet), or sipped a Gin Smash at Hotel Il Pellicano, or spent mellow afternoons on the terrace at La Posta Vecchia, you can indeed bring a piece of the dream into your home. For Sciò, design has always been about creating atmosphere, and the artful curation of these products – both in the hotels and on the digital platform – demonstrates exactly why Pellicano Hotels is leading the way as a global design tastemaker at the intersection of luxury travel, style and culture.

Europe saw its fair share of luxury fashion-hotel collaborations this summer which celebrated the fusion of design, culture and artisanship; Dolce & Gabbana rolled out its blue-and-white majolica print at the Four Seasons Taormina, and in Capri, Marbella and St Tropez, Jacquemusunveiled its Portofino pop-up, while Valentino painted Palazzo Avinopink for its beach club concept in Amalfi. You expected branding, you expected blissful locations, and that is largely what you got. But in Ischia, on the other hand, you probably didn’t expect to discover handmade treasures from Ceramiche Mennella, the oldest ceramics workshop on the island and one of the oldest in Italy, with a 500+ year legacy. You probably also didn’t expect to be sipping your morning coffee from one of their striped espresso cups two months after your holiday ended. Did you?

The worlds of design, style and luxury hotels have always been inherently linked. But true luxury, it seems, is not simply about having 5 stars. True luxury is the hand-painted stars around the rim of your dinner plate (…with a prawn tarte crowned with peach and hazelnuts in the centre), and the subtle discoveries, artisanal stories and cultural philosophies we are invited to connect with through the power of design in our hotel room, and far beyond.